A tag based learning approach to knowledge acquisition for constructing prior knowledge and enhancing student reading comprehension

Prior knowledge is an important issue in the study of concept acquisition among students. Traditional studies on prior knowledge generation during reading activities have focused on extracting sentences from reading materials that are manually generated by website administrators and educators. This is time-consuming and strenuous, and hence personalized prior knowledge recommendation is difficult to perform. To cope with this problem, we combine the concept of prior knowledge with social tagging methods to assist the reading comprehension of students studying English. We incorporate tags into a tag based learning approach, which then identifies suitable supplementary materials for quickly constructing a student's prior knowledge reservoir. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach benefits the students by embedding the additional information in social knowledge, and hence significantly improve their on-line reading efficiency. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.